That rage made Rosenthal an electrifying writer, early on, and it animated one of his achievements as a journalist that yesterday's Times obit didn't highlight—the exploration of the Holocaust.

Former Timesman Ari Goldman wrote last year that "There Is No News From Auschwitz," Rosenthal's 1958 magazine piece from the death camp, was one of the key texts in American Jewish life. A revolutionary piece of journalism, Goldman says. At the time American culture was still in denial of the Holocaust. Rosenthal's personal piece came out the same year as Leon Uris's Exodus, but before the Eichmann trial and before Elie Wiesel's Night. Rosenthal later told Goldman he didn't think the Times would run his piece. For it was written with a personal moral agitation that was also elegant and inarguable.

Anger over the Holocaust played an important role in Rosenthal's career. In 1964, when he had become city editor, he learned at lunch with the police commissioner about the sidewalk stabbing death of Kitty Genovese in Queens, as people in the apartment house on Austin Street ignored her cries. Rosenthal jumped on the story. Though other Timesmen reported it, Rosenthal wrote a book on the case, called Thirty-Eight Witnesses. Read that book today and it doesn't feel like journalism. It is rather vague about all the witnesses. There is little hard fact in the case; as the Wikipedia entry shows, the case was mythologized. (Note Charles Kaiser's questions about it, too, in the Observer.) But the Genovese case was itself a Holocaust drama: it was further proof for Rosenthal that a moral horror could occur without anyone lifting a finger. (One of the ironies of the case was that many people in the apartment house were Jews, including my grandparents).

In years to come, after he left the newspaper's executive editorship, Rosenthal's rage would include the Times itself, for failing to cover the Holocaust. Here are his comments about the Times coverage for a documentary prepared by the Newseum

But then I started thinking more about the concept of “the movie that ruined my life.” I began having fascinating discussions with people I knew about the movies they said ruined their lives. About the power of certain films, the way they can infect, sicken or at the very least cast a lasting pall over our vision of the world and of human nature. It can be a movie that is so powerfully life-changingly good in its depiction of badness: A couple of women mentioned Mike Leigh’s Naked. Or it can be powerfully life-changingly bad in its depiction of goodness: One person mentioned Patch Adams.

Anyway, I soon realized, after giving it a little more thought, that my life had already been ruined by a movie long before I saw the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. A movie that had me looking at life through the lens of doom long before I saw Olivia Hussey expire so seductively in the tomb of the Capulets.

My life had been ruined by On the Beach.

This is something that became even clearer to me after seeing the recent Showtime remake. I hoped it might demystify for me a film I hadn’t seen since I was 12 years old. After all, the original had a genuinely stellar cast. Gregory Peck as the American submarine commander who surfaces his ship in Melbourne, Australia, in the wake of a nuclear war that has destroyed the Northern Hemisphere and left a deadly cloud of radioactive fallout moving inexorably south. Ava Gardner as the Australian party girl who tries to make him forget his family incinerated in America. Anthony Perkins as his Australian navy liaison whose wife (Donna Anderson) refuses to believe they’re all doomed. And most memorably, Fred Astaire playing totally and brilliantly against type as the gloomy Ferrari-driving scientist who articulates the existential bleakness of it all, the futility of trying to come to terms with the onrushing extinction of life on the planet.

The remake featured instead Armand Assante as the sub commander, Rachel Ward in the Ava Gardner role and Bryan Brown as the bitter scientist. I still can’t watch Bryan Brown on screen without thinking of him flipping fifths of liquor in sync with Tom Cruise in Cocktail, a movie so idiotic it’s almost an argument for the extinction of life on the planet.

But despite this, the remake of On the Beach got to me. Left me feeling devastated. Brought it all back. Then I made the mistake of going out and renting the 1959 original and I understood. It’s a genuinely powerful film, immensely skillful and surprisingly underplayed. For instance, for the first hour of the film it gathers remarkable power by what it withholds, what it doesn’t say.

The only way it lets on what happened to America, what happened to us in the nuclear war, is in this brief offhand exchange between a couple of the Australian characters talking about the American sub commander played by Peck:

“Did he have children?”

“Two kids.”

“They’re gone?”

“They were in America.”

I don’t know, maybe you had to be there, to be a baby boomer growing up with the threat of the Bomb blighting your vision of the future. (Still, I’d argue that part of the power of James Cameron’s brilliant, underrated Terminator films was due to the way they recapitulated and rewound nuclear-war terror for a new generation.) But experiencing the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis at the cusp of puberty and adolescence, all of it inflected by a genre of book and film I’ve called “nukeporn,” was different.

I have a curious relationship with the word “nukeporn,” a word I coined in a 1978 Harper’s piece called “The Subterranean World of the Bomb,” a piece that explored, among other things, the psychic internalization of the external threat of nuclear extinction. Recently I got a call from my friend Jesse Sheidlower, who is the American editor of the encyclopedic and definitive Oxford English Dictionary. He’d recently discovered, in the dictionary’s database of citations for new coinages, that my word “nukeporn” was cited as the very first use they could find in print of the now familiar practice of adding “porn” as a suffix to words, as in “kiddieporn” and “foodporn.”

Not exactly the kind of immortality I’d envisioned for myself, but nonetheless, looking back, there does seem to have been some validity to the term. Here’s how I described my formative adolescent encounter with the nukeporn genre in that Harper’s piece:

“I’d started with the soft core stuff: the tearjerking postattack tristesse of the slowly expiring Australian survivors in On the Beach, spiced as it was with a memorable seduction ploy in which a doom-maddened woman goes so far as to unfasten her bikini top on a first date, a hint of the unleashed inhibitions the end of the world could engender. This only aroused my appetite for the more explicit stuff: such nuclear foreplay novels as Red Alert and Fail-Safe with their mounting urgencies as the stiffening finger on the atomic button brought the trembling world to the brink of ‘going all the way,’ to use a metaphor from another adolescent preoccupation whose urgencies may indeed have fueled this one … nuclear war novels were … dramas of inhibition and release.”

(By the way, for those of you who feel a “mounting urgency” to read further on this subject and many of my other obsessions, you could use your “stiffening finger” to go online and order my collection The Secret Parts of Fortune, which reprints the Harper’s piece, a couple dozen Observer columns and much more.)

But looking back on that passage, I think I was being too blithe about On the Beach. I was in denial about the extent to which it had ravaged my outlook on life--or maybe it’s only now I have the perspective to see its malign effects.

I was being facetious about the “doom-maddened” bikini-top untying, but clearly the moment had left an impression on me. I just don’t think it’s healthy that my first stirring experience of sexuality on the big screen was in the context of the desperate longings of the last survivors of humanity. It’s just not a party-hearty kind of thing.

What really made On the Beach so powerful and distinctive, such a lifelong, life-ruining downer, was that it was the first film and book (it was based on the novel by Nevil Shute) to popularize (if that’s the right word) the notion of Total Extinction. Hiroshima had introduced the world to the searing horror of one nuclear blast, and there was an abstract awareness that, in the dozen or so years since Hiroshima, there were now enough nuclear and thermonuclear weapons available that all-out “total spasm war” (as the nuclear strategist Herman Kahn had called it in the famous “Escalation ladder” he erected) might not just cause hundreds of millions, even billions, of blast and radiation casualties. But, in fact, it might cause what one nuclear strategist described as “the death of consciousness” on the planet: radiation fallout so severe that all human life, even on the far fringes of the actual war zones, would die. Not just partial extermination, but total extinction.

Nevil Shute found a haunting, almost beautiful, way of dramatizing this horror: from the perspective of the last survivors on the far fringes. For those who haven’t seen it (and I highly recommend you rent it, in hopes more lives than mine will be ruined by it), On the Beach imagines a nuclear war that has left everyone in the Northern Hemisphere dead from the immediate blasts and radiation, and a deadly radioactive cloud slowly proceeding south from the equator, killing all in its path.

It was the first vision of “nuclear winter,” and although the concept is scientifically controversial (some contend that a nuclear war would not kill all humans on the planet--what a relief!), it made for a powerful, wrenching drama.

Everyone in the movie knows they’re going to die soon, as each bit of false hope and illusory scientific optimism is extinguished. The film is about the way the survivors try to deal not just with their own deaths, but with the unimaginable, unassimilable death of humanity itself.

This is strong stuff for a kid just coming of age. Long before it became the Sex Pistols’ incantation (in “God Save the Queen”), I grew up seriously thinking I had “No Future.”

Of course it didn’t have that effect on everyone my age. Last fall Elizabeth Mitchell, one of George W. Bush’s biographers, asked me to fax her an essay I’d done for a Yale reunion classbook about “the meaning of ’68ness” (I was a classmate of W., although in a far nerdier English-major realm than his frat-boy milieu.) I was struck by how incredibly gloomy I was about my birth year in that essay.

“To understand the singularity of ’68,” I’d written, “one first has to study the singularity of ’46, the year most of us were born …. Now that was a moment--the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima--[when] the war-weary world awakens to the magnitude of one holocaust and suddenly finds itself under the threat of another one …. We were the first crop of babies to drink atomic fallout in our mother’s milk … the first to be born into post-nuclear nuclear families …. We saw the beginning of the End …. Face it, the four horsemen were hovering around our delivery rooms, smacking their lips, whispering seductively, ‘apocalypse now.’”

Jeez what a Gloomy Gus I was! Somehow I suspect George W. didn’t entertain these kinds of thoughts about his birth year. (Maybe he never saw On the Beach.) Although, who knows, maybe it did affect him in a subtle way. After all, he didn’t seize the privileges available to him in a grim go-getter careerist way. The most interesting (and likable) thing about him is that he didn’t seem to have much direction at all until after he reached 40. This is a symptom of ’68ness, or ’46ness.

I know I tend to blame my own character flaws on my apocalypse-haunted, Cuban Missile Crisis–traumatized, nukeporn adolescence: my habitual disinclination to make plans, any kind of plans, but particularly long-term plans for the future I never thought would come. My preference for instant gratification over self-restraint and self-sacrifice; my preference for wasting time with Falstaffian rogues rather than networking with forward-looking Coffee Achievers. The way my affinity for an absurdist, black-humored attitude to life served in some way to distance and detach me from a full commitment to conventional life. I never expected to live this long, I always had a feeling of living a kind of temporarily reprieved posthumous life. And, now that I’m still around, I’m not very well prepared for it.

But that’s O.K., because deep down I don’t think I’ll have to adjust. Deep down I’m still convinced we’re doomed. Doomed! Doomed before long to witness another Holocaust, this one perhaps combining elements of both Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

Think I’m being a bit pessimistic? Well, it’s true I think about these things more than I should, more than is good for me, but does anyone really think the “peace process” in the Middle East is going to work? Sure, everyone involved should go on acting as if it might work, because that’s the only chance it will.

But even if the peace process works on paper, it will be a peace the Jewish state signs with some Arab leaders, while others, perhaps even those who do the signing, will never be at peace with the existence of “the Zionist entity.” And sooner or later, someone--people, nations, groups, terrorists, whatever--will have a nuclear weapon big enough to wipe out Tel Aviv, and sooner or later they’ll use it, and there’s little doubt the Israelis will retaliate with their nukes. Perhaps not a planet-destroying Holocaust but a local one, and for my people a second one. A spirit-destroying Holocaust. While I’ve always loved the idea of the state of Israel, my worst fear has always been that some day, in some way, the ingathering of Jews there would serve a “concentration” function similar to Hitler’s death camps, to make it easier to kill the Jews again.

For a long time I used to hope something could be worked out. I used to believe all problems are soluble, because the consequences of not solving this problem were inconceivable. But now I wonder about that. The tragedy of history is that some problems have no solution. Ever. I don’t see love triumphing over hate in history. I see just the opposite. Why should this be different?

And of course, the Middle East isn’t the only place it could happen. The remake of On the Beach posited a nuclear war in the year 2006 that begins over Taiwan. The mainland Chinese lose patience and decide to take the island by force; we’re pledged to defend it, but don’t have the means to defend it with conventional forces. The only way to defend Taiwan successfully would be to try to force the Chinese to back down with a nuclear threat. Maybe they’ll call our bluff, and then what? We’re back on the beach.

I don’t want to bring you down. But then again, maybe I do. I’m envious of people who walk around without being troubled by the threat of planetary extinction ruining their mood, the way it still can ruin mine.

I remember, I swear this is true, that after seeing On the Beach I started walking around--in junior high school--wearing a pin produced for the Ban the Bomb group SANE. It read “There’s Still Time Brother.” It came from On the Beach. The stunning last frame of the film flashes on a lifeless cityscape, on a church which flies the now pitifully ironic banner “There’s Still Time Brother,” the last desperate plea to turn to the Lord by Christian evangelists before the radioactive cloud extinguished life.

The fine print on the SANE button beneath “There’s Still Time Brother” read “Work for a Sane Nuclear Policy.” It was, in a way, an optimistic spin on the despairing last frame of On the Beach. It professed a faith in sanity I’m not sure the past century bears out. In fact, I’m not sure there’s “still time.” It may already be too late. We escaped nuclear war by a whisker a couple of times during the Cold War. I’m not sure we’ll be so lucky again. Have a nice day.

An actor, however great, relating the horrors of the death camps on Broadway is nothing I relish seeing. I can’t even accept that the Holocaust should be represented onstage or film. The awful, feel-good sentimentality of The Diary of Anne Frank isn’t for anyone with any sense. (She’s in the attic!) For me, the adorable Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, with its uplifting happy end, is, unwatchable—and worse, a moral disgrace.

However popular the numerous, award-winning TV concentration-camp dramas of the week might be, I see them as an obscenity interrupted by commercial breaks. However “sincere” Steven Spielberg’s co-option of the Holocaust is in the name of “remembering,” I walked out of Schindler’s List unable to take his sanctimonious Schindler, the Righteous Christian as Savior, and the Hollywood fakery of it all.

“Take One!” “It’s a wrap!” “Good job everyone!” “That’s an Academy Award–winning performance right there!” Without Mr. Spielberg—it has been commonly said—an entire generation of young Americans would never have heard of the Holocaust. A quick test: What do any of you remember about Schindler’s List?

Anything? It’s coming back now ... a little, perhaps. The plot—vaguely. Liam Neeson was in it. The shooting scene was good. Powerful. Hit home. But what was it actually about? And if our memories are a bit shaky about the movie, what about the real godless thing?

In any event, what have these Spielberg-educated Americans really learned? What do they know?

They—we, almost all of us—can know next to nothing about the death camps. We who were not there can never know. Primo Levi knew the truth, and he spoke the truth, but he was history’s witness who also wrote uncompromisingly in his great books how history itself has become so simplified in the need to make life clear-cut by dramatizing the Holocaust that the outcome is its inevitable trivialization.

Levi wrote sternly in his last book, his masterpiece The Drowned and the Saved: “Anyone who today reads (or writes) the history of the Lager reveals the tendency, indeed the need, to separate evil from good, to be able to take sides, to emulate Christ’s gesture on Judgment Day: here the righteous, over there the reprobates. The young above all demand clarity, a sharp cut; their experience of the world being meager, they do not like ambiguity …. ”

Who is the drowned, who the saved? Was the survivor Primo Levi truly saved? He was presumed to have committed suicide at 67. What sorrow that man must have drowned in all his life, condemned to bear witness to the unimaginable.

Is it true, as Elie Wiesel says of Levi’s presumed suicide, that “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later”? And yet he lived to tell the world. There were no witnesses; he left no note. He plunged to his death off his balcony. But he was known to have been suffering from dizzy spells. The balcony rail was low. What if his death was a horrible accident? And what cruel joke of history is that? God’s joke on the world’s survivor.

But suppose Levi killed himself because life—mundane life, the pain of simply being alive—was in the end too much for him? What then? Could he never be just unhappily, depressively “normal”? The image lets us down somehow, as life lets us down.

The high-minded intellectuals with their nice clean hands who blame Levi for his apparent “suicide” are one of life’s tragic absurdities—the evil of banality. His death to them mocked their own cliché of the survivor’s manual: the Transcendence of the Human Spirit. “Good” was vanquished by its own hand. The Nazis won!

But if you were Jean Améry, the Austrian philosopher and resistance fighter who was tortured by the Gestapo—and is quoted by Levi in The Drowned and the Saved—the Nazis did win:

“Anyone who is tortured remains tortured …. Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world, the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again.”

Levi noted, “Torture was for him an interminable death.” Améry killed himself some 30 years later.

Perhaps Antony Sher sympathizes with some of my points about “staging” the Holocaust and the swirling confusions about the meaning of Levi’s life and death. I’m relieved to report that Mr. Sher has said how he believes it’s impossible to put Auschwitz on stage or film in any conventional sense. The convention is to reproduce and imitate the death camps. That’s the last thing he does.

He has adapted Levi’s first essential book, his 1947 If This Is a Man (better known here as Survival in Auschwitz), and taken as his model Claude Lanzmann’s great documentary, Shoah. It is the greatest of all Holocaust documentaries precisely because it avoids all newsreels of the camps and therefore all stock responses. His middle-aged witnesses relate their stories, and to our disbelief and horror we hear them as if for the first time.

So Mr. Sher appears as the survivor Primo Levi, bearded and middle-aged, to tell the story of Auschwitz. I’ve seen this leading British actor a number of times over the years, and this is the best performance he has ever given. There have been times when, being no fool, he knows how to lay it on (his amazing Richard III whizzing about the stage on crutches; his unquiet Macbeth). But in Primo, he achieves an acting miracle by not seeming to act.

He is acting, of course. He’s on a stage. We’re in the audience. But he does not perform. The singular achievement of Mr. Sher’s commitment to the awesome integrity of Primo Levi is also Primo’s flaw. It cannot be otherwise.

Levi was a scientist, and the scrupulous, unsentimentalized detail of his Survival in Auschwitz is clinical and innately “untheatrical.” Primo is no conventional drama or show.

“To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one,” Mr. Sher’s Levi tells us. “It has not been easy or quick, but the Germans have succeeded.”

This great actor delivers that astonishing line unemotionally, almost matter-of-factly. And yet it is surely one of the most horrifying statements we could ever hear.

Directed with admirable, spare clarity by Richard Wilson, Primo compels us to listen to things we know and will never know. May I just say to those who leap up enthusiastically at the end to give the ritual standing ovation that silence would be the greatest tribute Mr. Sher could receive, a pause, at least, before we go on our way.

An actor, however great, relating the horrors of the death camps on Broadway is nothing I relish seeing. I can’t even accept that the Holocaust should be represented onstage or film. The awful, feel-good sentimentality of The Diary of Anne Frank isn’t for anyone with any sense. (She’s in the attic!) For me, the adorable Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, with its uplifting happy end, is, unwatchable—and worse, a moral disgrace.

However popular the numerous, award-winning TV concentration-camp dramas of the week might be, I see them as an obscenity interrupted by commercial breaks. However “sincere” Steven Spielberg’s co-option of the Holocaust is in the name of “remembering,” I walked out of Schindler’s List unable to take his sanctimonious Schindler, the Righteous Christian as Savior, and the Hollywood fakery of it all.

“Take One!” “It’s a wrap!” “Good job everyone!” “That’s an Academy Award–winning performance right there!”

Without Mr. Spielberg—it has been commonly said—an entire generation of young Americans would never have heard of the Holocaust. A quick test: What do any of you remember about Schindler’s List?

Anything? It’s coming back now ... a little, perhaps. The plot—vaguely. Liam Neeson was in it. The shooting scene was good. Powerful. Hit home. But what was it actually about? And if our memories are a bit shaky about the movie, what about the real godless thing?

In any event, what have these Spielberg-educated Americans really learned? What do they know?

They—we, almost all of us—can know next to nothing about the death camps. We who were not there can never know. Primo Levi knew the truth, and he spoke the truth, but he was history’s witness who also wrote uncompromisingly in his great books how history itself has become so simplified in the need to make life clear-cut by dramatizing the Holocaust that the outcome is its inevitable trivialization.

Levi wrote sternly in his last book, his masterpiece The Drowned and the Saved: “Anyone who today reads (or writes) the history of the Lager reveals the tendency, indeed the need, to separate evil from good, to be able to take sides, to emulate Christ’s gesture on Judgment Day: here the righteous, over there the reprobates. The young above all demand clarity, a sharp cut; their experience of the world being meager, they do not like ambiguity …. ”

Who is the drowned, who the saved? Was the survivor Primo Levi truly saved? He was presumed to have committed suicide at 67. What sorrow that man must have drowned in all his life, condemned to bear witness to the unimaginable.

Is it true, as Elie Wiesel says of Levi’s presumed suicide, that “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later”? And yet he lived to tell the world. There were no witnesses; he left no note. He plunged to his death off his balcony. But he was known to have been suffering from dizzy spells. The balcony rail was low. What if his death was a horrible accident? And what cruel joke of history is that? God’s joke on the world’s survivor.

But suppose Levi killed himself because life—mundane life, the pain of simply being alive—was in the end too much for him? What then? Could he never be just unhappily, depressively “normal”? The image lets us down somehow, as life lets us down.

The high-minded intellectuals with their nice clean hands who blame Levi for his apparent “suicide” are one of life’s tragic absurdities—the evil of banality. His death to them mocked their own cliché of the survivor’s manual: the Transcendence of the Human Spirit. “Good” was vanquished by its own hand. The Nazis won!

But if you were Jean Améry, the Austrian philosopher and resistance fighter who was tortured by the Gestapo—and is quoted by Levi in The Drowned and the Saved—the Nazis did win:

“Anyone who is tortured remains tortured …. Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world, the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again.”

Levi noted, “Torture was for him an interminable death.” Améry killed himself some 30 years later.

Perhaps Antony Sher sympathizes with some of my points about “staging” the Holocaust and the swirling confusions about the meaning of Levi’s life and death. I’m relieved to report that Mr. Sher has said how he believes it’s impossible to put Auschwitz on stage or film in any conventional sense. The convention is to reproduce and imitate the death camps. That’s the last thing he does.

He has adapted Levi’s first essential book, his 1947 If This Is a Man (better known here as Survival in Auschwitz), and taken as his model Claude Lanzmann’s great documentary, Shoah. It is the greatest of all Holocaust documentaries precisely because it avoids all newsreels of the camps and therefore all stock responses. His middle-aged witnesses relate their stories, and to our disbelief and horror we hear them as if for the first time.

So Mr. Sher appears as the survivor Primo Levi, bearded and middle-aged, to tell the story of Auschwitz. I’ve seen this leading British actor a number of times over the years, and this is the best performance he has ever given. There have been times when, being no fool, he knows how to lay it on (his amazing Richard III whizzing about the stage on crutches; his unquiet Macbeth). But in Primo, he achieves an acting miracle by not seeming to act.

He is acting, of course. He’s on a stage. We’re in the audience. But he does not perform. The singular achievement of Mr. Sher’s commitment to the awesome integrity of Primo Levi is also Primo’s flaw. It cannot be otherwise.

Levi was a scientist, and the scrupulous, unsentimentalized detail of his Survival in Auschwitz is clinical and innately “untheatrical.” Primo is no conventional drama or show.

“To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one,” Mr. Sher’s Levi tells us. “It has not been easy or quick, but the Germans have succeeded.”

This great actor delivers that astonishing line unemotionally, almost matter-of-factly. And yet it is surely one of the most horrifying statements we could ever hear.

Directed with admirable, spare clarity by Richard Wilson, Primo compels us to listen to things we know and will never know. May I just say to those who leap up enthusiastically at the end to give the ritual standing ovation that silence would be the greatest tribute Mr. Sher could receive, a pause, at least, before we go on our way.

Not having been there personally doesn't mean the image isn't burned into one's awareness. The terrible spiky desolation brings to mind paintings by Anselm Kiefer, which reinforce recollections of another place seen earlier this year, another site of the unmatchable horrors that flow from the insane confluence of innocence, fanaticism, malevolence and technology.

I mean Auschwitz, which I visited this year, believing it to be an essential experience for any non-Jew (most of my Jewish friends find themselves unable to make the journey south from Kraków).

I haven't written about my visit to Auschwitz, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, because I personally haven't been able to find words to confront the sheer emotional and physical scale of the place, which in quick order forces recognition of the sheer scale of the evil that was done there. Auschwitz takes away the vagueness of the event; once seen, one knows what was done there and how it was done in a way that no metaphorical or descriptive art can capture. The day we went, the sky was fair and the ground grass-covered, but one felt the ash in the air, just as I suspect one will "feel" ash in the river breezes a half-century from now as one walks along West Street.

If there is a West Street.

For reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has ever read the sort of letters people with "pride of oppression"-my grievance is quantitatively or qualitatively bigger than your grievance-write to editors, I dare not compare Auschwitz and the World Trade Center, even though I feel that industrial-scale homicide begs precise measurement. But there is one way in which Auschwitz and the W.T.C. do merit mention in the same framework.

If Hitler had been assassinated in the late 1930's, as some advocated, there very likely would never have been a Holocaust. Oddly, neither of the two books of "speculative history" on my shelves, What If? and Virtual History, addresses this question, although the editor of the former, Rob Cowley, does point to Hitler's "evil charisma" as a key element-if not the key element-in the rise of Nazism. Would Sept. 11 have occurred without an Osama bin Laden, a Saddam Hussein? People closely acquainted with the specifics think not. Sudan apparently wanted to hand over Mr. bin Laden in 1996, but the United States demurred, feeling that we didn't have a case; of course, back then we were governed by a "what, us worry?" administration much concerned with legal niceties, which would not long afterward stand reason and decency on their heads in an effort to define the precise legal meaning of the word "is."

If Islamic fundamentalism can be decapitated, so to speak, with the elimination of Osama bin Laden-the objective of the military operations now under way in Afghanistan-and of Saddam Hussein (as this space urged two weeks ago), chances improve that a repeat of the W.T.C. or worse will not occur. For a definition of what "worse" might be-including the hijacking and crashing of large cargo planes such as those operated by FedEx and U.P.S.-I urge you to read Richard Garwin's article in the current New York Review of Books.

To turn a mob-or a much smaller network of disaffected individuals-into an efficient killing machine requires a man (or woman-think Joan of Arc) at its head. Someone who is not just a paymaster, but a force. Such as Hitler was, or Robespierre and St. Just, or Lenin. If cooler heads are to prevail, the hottest ones need to be lopped off. By hottest heads, I mean "a single voice that effectively articulated grievances and won support for violence" (as Barton Gellman of The Washington Post describes Osama bin Laden in the International Herald-Tribune of Oct. 4).

At home, this is also a time for cool thinking, as the country and city passes from what I think of as Post-Trauma Stage I, during which everyone behaves as well and as selflessly and as usefully as he or she possibly can, to Post-Trauma Stage II, when individuals and institutions begin to revert to type as life, yes, goes on. The Rudy We Knew prior to Sept. 11 was no more a figment of ours (and the media's) collective imagination than the Rudy who presided with such magnificent forthrightness in the wake of the W.T.C. calamity.

Of course, Rudy's a cop at heart, always has been. His next job ought to be as head of the task force established to hunt down and destroy al Qaeda's financing sources and networks, an effort in which he could deputize his greatest score, Michael Milken, now his pal in consequence of their mutual experience of prostate cancer. Who understands better than Mr. Milken how money moves? Indeed, isn't it reasonable to describe his junk-bond "daisy chain" as a form of Wall Street hawala?

It's a time of personal and collective cognitive dissonance, as we come to grips with what a cheesy, trivialized society we had become-dominated by a politics of self-indulgence posing as self-expression, with expenditure the chief signifier of quality and value-and wonder if we are as powerless as appears to be the case to prevent ourselves from returning to that condition. The evidence isn't encouraging.

Not that some of it isn't downright funny. It's at times like these that the rich tend to feed our need for clowns. Last Sunday's New York Times Style section reported the antics of what we'll call the "well-to-do-it-yourself" crowd, who are determinedly getting back to nature indoors with busywork and tatting and showing Martha's bourgeois adherents qui est qui. I especially enjoyed the idea of House Beautiful editor Marian McEvoy-a woman who looks as if she last went out of doors to spectate at Calvin Coolidge's inauguration-gathering and then gluing dead leaves to her dining-room wall. I also enjoyed Times reporter Ruth La Ferla's description of two smallish paintings as homages "to the Florentine interiors of Donatello"-notwithstanding that the pictures illustrated are palpably of exteriors, and that Donatello, greatest of Quattrocento sculptors, did no architecture. This is what I mean by post-traumatic cognitive dissonance, when even the subtlest minds mistake up for down, inside for out.

And then, thankfully, there's Talk. The latest (November) issue is a study of the point I'm trying to make. Inside are two sets of photographic group portraits-one set of two made subsequent to Sept. 11; the other, of six, made prior to the awful date-that illustrate the kind of people deemed to reflect the real, the great, the gritty, the unvanquishable New York, capital city of The World According to Tina. The post-W.T.C. images are of the staff at St. Vincent's hospital, and of a group of firefighters and relief workers. That's one New York.

The other New York is quite different. A visiting Martian examining these six images, made between Jan. 11 and Sept. 10 (with hastily added captions to provide post–Sept. 11 relevance and "depth"), might experience perceptual dissonance. These photos are of a Bronx elementary school (of the "charter" variety, naturally); a so-so aggregation of behind-the-camera movie types; some jazz musicians, most of whom appear to be over 80; some chefs and chef-kissers; a photographer and his studio crew pretending to be Warhol's Factory; and-my favorite-"The Heavy Hitters," a collection of boldface habitués of the Four Seasons, who are the present era's equivalent of Britain's "Cliveden Set" back before World War II.

I'll be returning to the latter in a future column, because they tell us so much. Suffice it to say that, suitably, at the picture's formal epicenter is a moral void-namely Henry Kissinger-and next to him, preening with sheer joy at having been chosen for inclusion in such a glittering, glorious company, is the Republican candidate for Mayor. And people beat up on Fernando Ferrer for hanging out with Al Sharpton!

Six photos of what "makes" New York, at least in its pre–Sept. 11 incarnation as seen by Talk. Not a doctor, not a jurist, not a writer. Not a professor. No curator, museum director, editor, critic, visual artist, person of the theater. No figure from sports in a city that boasts a Super Bowl team, a World Series champion, that is the fons et origo of "the city game." No one from advertising. For journalists, Talk gives us a gossip columnist and a bunch of TV interviewers. For finance-don't get me started! Let it be noted that the "Heavy Hitters" image includes Alex and Julian, who own the Four Seasons and therefore dictate placement-which may be what life at the top is all about.

Indeed it may. But as the kid declares in the famous New Yorker cartoon, "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it!"

POSTSCRIPT: From now through January, the New-York Historical Society will be exhibiting John Koch: Painting a New York Life. I had something to do with putting this show together. It was conceived to provoke reflection-but in times like these, when we're besieged by questions of self-identity, it may also prove consoling. I think you'll enjoy it. I urge that you see it.

But of course "normally" vaporized this year as soon as the semester began, and I found myself, like every teacher in the country, faced with the question of how to proceed with my course, the premises of my subject, in the face of a collective sadness and unease unlike anything I've ever experienced.

Meeting my creative-writing class last week for the first time since the disaster, I brought in copies of W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939," a poem that's been everywhere in the air these last days. I thought that if my students didn't know it, they should. And as I was reading out the later lines of the opening stanza-

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odor of death

Offends the September night.

-I felt, I thought I felt, an attentiveness in the room that went beyond the usual open-eyed, if sometimes undiscriminating, receptivity. I had the sense that the words, to paraphrase a line from another Auden poem, were hurting and connecting.

We did not go on, as I'd thought we might, to talk about the poem. Instead, somehow, we got onto the question of the place of poetry-and, by extension, literature-in the face of the unspeakable. Why read or study it? What does it give us? Can words arranged on a page make a difference? Of course, I had to cite T.W. Adorno's famous dictum: "No poetry after Auschwitz." What could that mean?

Expressions around the room were mostly baffled. I wanted to break the question down. Did Adorno mean "no poetry" because we should not write it? Because the writing of poems celebrated the human in ways that had become unconscionable? Or because the assertion of purpose and inner coherence that poetry necessarily represents was somehow wrong, no longer viable? Or did Adorno mean "no poetry" because we could not ? Because an extreme of barbarism had revealed language to be inadequate, limited in what it could represent? Because barbarism had thus undermined the core assumption of the enterprise? But why single out poetry? Everything is ultimately limited. One might as well mark the enormity of moral devastation by insisting no anything .

Which becomes, of course, a paper argument, carried on in the face of human contrariness, the biological persistence that will rebuild the world no matter how many times it's torn apart. The argument about the writing and reading of poetry is also finally academic. No poetry after Auschwitz. Except that there was and there is: Akhmatova, Milosz, Bishop, Brodsky, Heaney, Lowell, Walcott, Plath, Herbert and thousands of others. Poetry has flourished since the time of the death camps, and not because it has looked away. It hasn't.

Problem solved. Except, alas, that it continued to vex, as it must now that the world has been torn apart again. Must , for asking the question is a way of addressing the pain, the very real sense of hopelessness that floods me over and over throughout the day. What is the place, the purpose, of poetry? I was asking it again that afternoon as I blazed my way east on the Mass Pike, lost in a thought fugue rare even for me, who am given to thought fugues on these long commutes. And by the time I reached the outskirts of Boston, I had a kind of answer.

It took a while to get there. My first thought, contra Adorno, was that disaster requires poetry precisely because of the implied perspective it-all literature-assumes: the seriousness and ongoing point of all things, however fragile the web of meaning may seem at times; and because poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication. As I'd just declaimed to my class from Auden:

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages

But then I had another, less expected idea. To understand the use of poetry, its particular importance in times like this, I realized, we need to understand the nature of trauma. This is a subject for deep study, of course, but a few generalizations are possible. To begin with, catastrophic trauma shatters norms; it upsets, in a way that feels permanent, the balance of things. It overwhelms our psychic system, melting down the usual response mechanisms whereby experiences are organized and stored as the stuff of memory. Further, this trauma creates for itself a kind of perpetual present. What is post-traumatic stress disorder but the psyche's inability to banish hurt to the past? In the sufferer-and we are now all to some degree sufferers-the pain stays alive, there to be activated at any moment. The plane keeps slicing into the building, each time fresh; it doesn't stop. We don't even need to see the loop any more.

And this , I thought, is where poetry comes in. Poetry does not, with its meanings and messages, defeat trauma; it does not argue it away with its countervailing sense of purpose. Nothing so simple: Poetry works on a deeper level. Because it mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor, reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.

For poetry is the reverse of the terrorist act, its antithesis-just as the terrorist act is the complete negation of the spirit of poetry. We read poetry because we need something to hold against horror, something to place alongside it that is equally persistent. Not because poetry overturns or disarms horror, but because it helps restore the delicate inner balance we call sanity.

And when this balance, this instinctive sense of moral proportion, is threatened-as it is now-we need poetry in the worst way. Shakespeare asked: "How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?" A rhetorical question. He knew. As did Auden, who in that most sustaining poem, with a modesty that seems to me just slightly disingenuous, wrote:

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Auden would not allow that poem to be reprinted in his Collected Poems , arguing that "We must love one another or die" was misleading, a false choice. I've always wondered where this sudden literalism came from, this misplaced sense of scruple. It's his best line.

There is a character in Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz called Henri, one of the few figures in the book whom the master Holocaust memoirist singles out for contempt. Henri is a Jewish inmate from Paris, so young he cannot grow a beard, civilized, intelligent, multilingual, pleasant; but he has mastered a skill so contemptible that Levi compares him to the Serpent in Genesis: He survives by capturing and playing upon the pity of the brutes who are the inmates' keepers and executioners. In a world that produces men who are not human when it does not simply produce corpses, Henri, Levi seems to be implying, is one of the most inhuman of all.

"Henri" is the name Primo Levi gave Paul Steinberg, an Auschwitz survivor who died in 1999. Steinberg only became aware that he himself was "that cold and calculating creature singled out by Primo Levi" late in life, on the cusp of writing Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning , which appeared in France in 1996 and is now out in an English translation by Linda Coverdale with Bill Ford. It is, the entire situation, rather interesting.

We live in a time of memory wars. Director Claude Lanzmann furiously battles Steven Spielberg for Mr. Spielberg's importuning of memory without moral license; historians Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning fight over the meaning of guilt; books by Tom Segev, Norman Finkelstein and Peter Novick each, in various ways, interrogate an aftermath that Mr. Finkelstein calls the "Holocaust Industry" and Art Spiegelman labels, in its worst excrescences, "Holokitsch." There are good memoirs, mediocre memoirs, faked Swiss memoirs, Swiss financial scandals, package tours to the killing grounds; there is Harvard casting about for years to choose someone for a new endowed chair in "Holocaust studies" that proves too controversial to fill. Memory "is sweating, oozing," writes Steinberg in one of his best metaphors.

I say "metaphor," which raises another order of complication: the reviewer's pang of conscience when describing what a Holocaust memoirist does in such ordinary literary terms as "metaphor"–as if Steinberg were writing any old kind of book. Morally, you feel like Wayne and Garth lying prostrate at the feet of Alice Cooper in Wayne's World : "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!" (If I can be allowed a joke–as if I were reviewing any old kind of book.)

In this case, however, the memoirist is even more conscious of these overdeterminations than the reviewer. Paul Steinberg reflects throughout on his working method ("A strange vacation assignment, one I've been planning for fifty years, for the moment in my life when I could freely devote myself to it," writing straight through the story in four months of fever dreams and mood swings). He thinks through the standard bromides about writing as therapy, as exorcism, meditates on the condition of writing a Holocaust memoir itself–wondering whether his traumatized recollections are not "trick[s] of the imagination," reminding himself "I must not let the writings of other witnesses affect me." Because this morbid ground has been gone over so many times, inevitably some of the things he writes about are familiar unto cliché: the gentiles protesting "we didn't know"; the cruel instruction upon deportation to pack a suitcase that the deportee will "get back" later; the liberated inmates who breathe their last while finally enjoying a restorative meal; that certain style of black humor; even the memoirist's heightened literary self-consciousness itself. Steinberg smartly makes sure you know he knows there are clichés here. Recalling from 1944 a "dreamless" night of sleep after a certain harrowing experience, he continues, "I wrote 'dreamless' almost automatically, without thinking." He corrects himself: He never dreamed in the camp.

Speak You Also calls attention to itself as an act of literature. So I feel no compunction about judging it as a piece of literature: It's not so good. Steinberg writes well sometimes, but he's no master. His visceral distinction between the early days in 1941 and 1942–"a time of handmade death"–and the time when gas chambers did the killing anonymously instead of guards doing it face-to-face is, for example, startling; but his decision to write an entire chapter about a friend of whom he remembers nothing is foolish. To get himself started, he seems to require the distancing strategy of writing in a garish and annoying Damon Runyon style: "way out in the sticks," "pop him one or two in the breadbasket," wearing the yellow star as a "trap for suckers." (I doubt it's the translators' fault.) The wiseguy tone drops away, but you're not sure whether this is a decision of craft or a failure of it.

He is all too aware, also, of the self-imposed burden to redeem his comrade Primo Levi's assessment, and he does so by reworking the familiar phenomenon of "survivor's guilt"; he stresses, instead, a kind of survivor's pride. This comes to grate. Then it comes to backfire. Pages are given over to recitations of his remarkable stratagems, special fitness for camp life, keen intellect and luck–his miraculous inducements of pity in the guards ("because in any flock of sheep … the herdsman always has his favorite"); his horrible childhood which gave him an "immersion course" in "continual displacements and readjustments, the absence of ties and enduring friendships"; even the remarkable good fortune of never having been circumcised. "Can one be so guilty for having survived?" he asks.

Other times he displays a kind of victim's guilt, reciting the times he thinks he could have escaped but didn't ("I went meekly to the slaughter like a lousy sheep"), as if somehow he could achieve the impossible, besting the Nazis once and for all. He seems to have become a nice enough old man. Still, it's hard not to recognize the figure Primo Levi described as "hard and distant, enclosed in armor, the enemy of all, inhumanly cunning and incomprehensible."

In the most affecting moments, it is his body, not his pen, which proves the best archaeologist. The body the writer lives in is the same one that was once inhabited by an emaciated, sickly ghost. The body that never lets itself onto a Paris bus because of a repressed memory of the last bus trip he ever took, which led him to his first holding camp; the body whose writing hand bears an oval scar from pustulence brought on by poorly thrown bricks in a camp chain gang; the body that doesn't know how to act like a mourner when mourning is called for because meaningless death was once too familiar for him. The body that watches American action movies and calls up fantasies about "do[ing] a Rambo" on SS soldiers.

As a survivor, of course, he has more than earned the right to think and feel this way. And who is to say these sentiments, which make him unusual among testifiers, can't make for worthy testimony, worthy writing, worthy art? No one. But to whom does it fall finally to judge the art? The critic, and properly so. And as literature, what we have here is a sometimes interesting, pleasant read–though that's not quite right. It's unpleasant, of course. But that's the problem: Considering the subject, Speak You Also is not nearly unpleasant enough.

Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang) will be published in March.

few seconds of film in Mr. Death -by an interview nobody had thought to do before Errol did-an interview buried in the middle of the documentary.

What astonished me on first watching Mr. Death is that Errol barely draws attention to the crushing refutation in the film; it's never commented upon, even though it is the pivot of the film, I believe, the lens that places everything else in the film in perspective, a lens that permits Errol to engage in what might otherwise be a disturbingly intimate exploration of the mind of a Holocaust denier.

Why such an exploration in the first place? Why devote time to an idiot like Mr. Leuchter? "The Holocaust is the central mystery of the 20th century," Errol remarks in one of several phone conversations after I'd seen a semifinal version of Mr. Death , "The mystery isn't, 'Did it happen?' but 'How could it possibly happen?' And by looking at someone like Leuchter, maybe we can learn something about that." Learn something about why ordinary Germans became Hitler's willing executioners by learning how apparent schnooks like Mr. Leuchter can, half a century later, become implicit accessories after the fact to mass murder by denying the crime happened.

But Mr. Morris has done more than explore the mind of Mr. Leuchter-he's exploded his bogus science. "Has this been reported before?" I asked Errol about the devastating testimony Errol evokes from the lab scientist who did the chemical analysis that Mr. Leuchter and the Holocaust deniers brazenly and ignorantly misused to give "scientific credibility" to their hateful no-gas-chamber lies.

"No one had ever asked him before," Errol said, adding once again, "but I don't want this to be about proving the world round."

Over the course of our recent conversations he almost reluctantly disclosed the investigative odyssey that underlies Mr. Death , including the archival detective work behind an important historical deduction and a stunning discovery he didn't even bother to include in the film.

When it comes to Holocaust denial, is it worth proving the world is round? It's a question Errol and I had frequent occasion to discuss and occasionally argue about in the past six years or so as he was working on Mr. Death and I was finishing the manuscript of Explaining Hitler in which I address the relationship between Holocaust deniers and Holocaust perpetrators-the origin of the former in the latter. And it might be worth sketching that context as a way of explaining why I think Mr. Morris' investigative achievement is more important than he is willing to acknowledge.

Holocaust denial is such a peculiarly postmodern phenomenon-both an expression of, and a refutation of, the key postmodernist dogma that there is no such thing as truth, historical or otherwise, there are only "constructions," "competing narratives" with no reason to "privilege" one over the other-so postmodern that it's often forgotten that the very first Holocaust denier was the chief Holocaust perpetrator: Adolf Hitler. (It would be somewhat unfair to call Hitler the first postmodernist.)

In fact, in reading through the 1,000-page stenographic transcripts of Hitler's wartime dinner-table conversation, a chore I undertook in the course of researching my book, I came across what I believe is the first recorded moment in which Adolf Hitler, Holocaust perpetrator, becomes Adolf Hitler, Holocaust denier. Of course, we know he pursued a strategy of denial from the beginning: never, so far as we know, putting his signature on a written order (relying on oral Führer -orders) never allowing himself to be glimpsed in the vicinity of a death camp, disguising his intentions in what Lucy S. Dawidowicz, perhaps the most acute analyst of Hitler's denial strategy, has called "esoteric language." All of which gave would-be deniers like David Irving the excuse to make bogus deductions that since Hitler's signature could not be found, he never signed off on mass murder, and mass murder thus never happened.

But that's a kind of passive denial; there's a moment when one can see Hitler formulating an even more outrageous active denial strategy. It's a moment I came upon in the stenographic account of Hitler's "table talk" on Oct. 25, 1941, when his guests at dinner in the Führer 's command bunker on the Eastern front, the headquarters for his invasion of Russia, were Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler's two chief partners in genocide.

The hands of all three were already steeped in blood; already hundreds of thousands of Jews had been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the roving killing squads. And yet over tea and cakes down in the command bunker, with the stenographer present to take down Hitler's spin on history, Hitler called the notion that there's "a plan to exterminate The Jews" just a "rumor" being spread to slander him. Of course, he added the Jews deserve to be murdered, and he was glad the rumor was being spread, but it was just a rumor: the Jews were just being "parked" in "the marshy parts of Russia."

It is in this remarkable aside, preserved for us only by accident, that Hitler captures and epitomizes what I believe is the secret, unexpressed attitude of Hitler's successors, today's Holocaust deniers: They know it happened, they're glad it happened, the Jews deserved it, but they've found an ingenious way to twist the knife in the backs of the dead victims-by denying it happened, claiming their death is only a rumor, "propaganda," a lie, a myth. Confirmation that this is the true impetus beneath esoteric language of current Holocaust deniers can be found in the memoir of former neo-Nazi German skinhead leader Ingo Hasselbach ( Führer-Ex , with Tom Reiss).

Although this is, I believe the rule for most Holocaust deniers, is it true of Mr. Leuchter, the subject of Mr. Morris' documentary, the electric chair expert become gas chamber "debunker"? This is the key mystery at the heart of Mr. Death : Is Mr. Leuchter a gullible simpleton blinded by bad science or is he, beneath the aura of an aggrieved innocence, a more calculating and sinister figure little different from the vicious hatemongers who have taken him up as an icon of their cause?

It's a question-deluded true believer or cynical manipulator-that persists in scholarly debates over the mind of Hitler himself. A question that arises in the case of Mr. Leuchter: the calculus of delusion, self-deception and evil, a question I'd been discussing, sometimes arguing about, with Errol ever since he first showed me some of the early footage he'd shot of Mr. Leuchter. He'd been following Mr. Leuchter, observing him at close range (close enough to observe that the geeky fellow drinks upward of 40 cups of coffee a day). Following Mr. Leuchter from death row execution chambers where he plied his day job as an electric chair consultant, through his growing celebrity among the Holocaust revisionists who use The Leuchter Report as "scientific proof" that no gas chambers existed-and thus no mass murder transpired-at Auschwitz.

You may not be familiar with The Leuchter Report , a sad but sinister document in which Mr. Leuchter claims the analysis of stones and scrapings he vandalized from the walls of the crematoria at Auschwitz show no significant trace of cyanide gas. Which proves, Mr. Leuchter claims, that there were no gassings at Auschwitz. Ignore the massive testimony of Auschwitz eyewitnesses, inmates, guards and even the camp commandant because of my amateur chemistry experiment, Mr. Leuchter enjoins us. Yet millions of copies of this "report" have been distributed in dozens of languages by neo-Nazis all over the world, making Mr. Leuchter a celebrity name in that noxious company. He's made regular appearances at mock scholarly conferences of "revisionist historians." He's succeeded in converting once respected historians like Mr. Irving to Holocaust denial, on the basis of his so-called science. His credentials have been questioned, yes; he has no specialized training in chemical analysis. His sampling methods have been disputed (most of the original bricks and stones of wartime Auschwitz have been removed by local peasants in need of their own building materials.) But not until Mr. Morris looked into it did anyone check on Mr. Leuchter's lab work or look up the lab scientist who did the cyanide gas testing-and in one stroke refute Mr. Leuchter's pretensions to science.

Mr. Leuchter kept the lab man, Jim Roth, who has a doctorate in chemistry from Cornell, in the dark concerning exactly where the samples came from and what exactly he was testing for. In doing so, Mr. Leuchter remained in ignorance of a crucial fact about testing for cyanide gas. As Mr. Roth states in Mr. Death , cyanide gas would only penetrate to a few microns' depth in stone or plaster surfaces. And the fact that Mr. Leuchter took big chunks out of walls and floors, without telling the lab man that he wanted the outside surface analyzed, resulted in analysis of samples which, when pulverized, diluted upward of 10,000 times any cyanide that might have been found on the surface of the walls-even assuming Mr. Leuchter had the right surfaces in the first place.

Mr. Leuchter's test, his "proof," the whole Leuchter Report , then, was and is a joke, the product of ludicrously inadequate knowledge and slovenly reasoning, not science. Mr. Leuchter himself would be little more than a pathetic joke if his fraudulent thesis were not such a widely distributed, poisonously employed lie.

But again, as Errol asks, do we-does he-need to prove the world is round?

I don't know. It's a question that troubled me over the years Errol and I had been discussing this question. There are some in the Jewish community who believe in good faith that it's better to utterly ignore the Holocaust deniers, not give them legitimacy and publicity by "debating" their absurd premises. While I know it's a sincerely held point of view, I disagree with it: I believe Holocaust denial needs to be examined. All too often in the rhetoric of those who say to ignore them, I hear the echoes of those who said "ignore Hitler, he's too absurd to be taken seriously." (That's at the heart of my quarrel with film buffs who excuse Charlie Chaplin's trivializing film, The Great Dictator .)

The lesson I took from my study of the works of the heroic anti-Hitler journalists in Munich, who reported on his rise to power, was that Hitler and Nazism thrived on the counterfeiting of history and on the profusion of sinister conspiracy theories like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the "stab-in-the-back" theory (that Jews caused Germany to lose World War I). Munich journalists risked their lives to combat these theories because they knew that however absurd they were, they could have-and did have-profoundly evil consequences.

In addition, my notion of how to respond to Holocaust denial was shaped by my conversation with Prof. Berel Lang, the brilliant philosopher who had written about the idea of a "history of evil," a history in the evolution of human malignancy in which Hitler represented a new but not necessarily final chapter. What, then, might be the next chapter, the next step in the evolution of evil, if not Holocaust denial, a new demonically artful level of evil whose proponents find an ingenious way to murder the dead all over again? To relish the slaughter secretly while twisting the knife in the backs of the dead (talk about a stab in the back). To both erase the victims from history and yet assassinate their character and memory afresh. As such, it's a phenomenon, a mentality that deserves to be studied, and Mr. Morris' film represents a thoughtful, groundbreaking effort.

Still, when the time approached to see the film, I found myself worrying about my reaction to it, worrying whether it would strain our friendship. It was a concern I expressed in a column I'd done on the occasion of Errol's last film, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control . I'd spoken about my belief that what has made his work so distinctive, in Fast, Cheap , in Gates of Heaven , in The Thin Blue Line , was the tenderness, the genuinely loving attentiveness he lavishes on the often bizarre figures he films. That's what made Mr. Death "a kind of philosophical suspense story to me," I wrote. "Will these techniques work on a Holocaust-denying electric chair expert? Or will it be a film about the limits of humanizing explanation, the limits of the lens of love?"

Finally, I had to end the suspense: A British film crew was coming to New York to interview me for a television documentary they were making to be released in conjunction with Mr. Death and a retrospective of Errol's work at the Museum of Modern Art. And a MoMA curator had called me asking if I'd be the interlocutor in a "Conversation With Errol Morris" after one of the screenings. So I had to see what I felt about how he handled this potentially inflammatory topic.

What a relief it was when I finally saw Mr. Death . It's a film that demonstrates the philosophical sophistication Mr. Morris (a former doctoral student in philosophy) brings to the question. It's a film that does much more than refute the deniers: It unmasks them. I'm not going to speak of it in much detail this far in advance. (It's due to open in late December, though it's being screened at the Toronto Film Festival this month.) But I'm not reviewing it here in movie critic, film buff terms. There's plenty in the film for the esthetes to chew on. I just think it's important for the reception of Mr. Death to call attention to its achievement as investigative journalism. To point out, as someone familiar with the state of the art of Holocaust history and Holocaust denial, that this film advances the story in a way that a merely esthetic assessment of the film might miss.

In this respect, Mr. Death bears more than a casual relationship to The Thin Blue Line , a documentary about a Texas murder case in which Errol didn't merely play the esthete observer, he intervened to solve the murder and free the man wrongly convicted of it from a pending date with the executioner. Both films also are meditations on the questionable of scientific authority-in The Thin Blue Line , it's the testimony of the "forensic psychiatrist" Dr. James Grigson, a.k.a Dr. Death-and on Errol's recurring preoccupation with questions of epistemology: how do we know what we claim to know; how do we know what's inside each other's heads.

So there's certainly more in Mr. Death than a refutation of The Leuchter Report . Still, the refutation-and the precise weight and placement it's given in the film-is a key to its point of view. By slyly placing the refutation after we've watched smug self-satisfied deniers like Ernst Zundel and Mr. Irving cite it for its serious scientific authority, the film performs an act of revision: on the revisionists a kind of retrospective dunce cap is placed upon their heads, making them seem like sad clowns, somehow unaware of the funny hats that make them seem, for all their pretensions to rationality, like circus freaks. Errol doesn't even seem to say it; you just see it.

But there's more to Errol's investigative achievement in the film than this.

There is the remarkable archival detective story in which Errol, in conjunction with the brilliant historian of Auschwitz Robert Jan van Pelt (co-author with Deborah Dwork of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present ) broke the Auschwitz code of esoteric euphemisms to prove that a rare explicit reference in a document to a "gas chamber" ( Vergasungskeller ) was not the "carburation room," as the Holocaust deniers claim, but in fact the killing chamber they can no longer deny exists. It's too immensely complicated for me to recount this detective story in its entirety here, but after I drew it out of Errol he did finally own up to a kind of satisfaction with his documentary detective work. "I am a creature of documents," he said. He loves nothing better than to find the hidden esoteric truth in the subtext of an archival fragment.

In fact, the more I talked to him, the more remarkable investigative achievements I was able to draw out of him, ones that he seemed reluctant to speak of at first because he didn't want to make it a film that "proved the world round." Including one stunning discovery he didn't even include in the final footage of Mr. Death: he'd found and filmed the hatches to the gas chambers, the hatches through which the SS dropped the cyanide gas, the absence of which had been used by quacks like Mr. Leuchter to deny gassing occurred. He'd found them decaying in an abandoned storage room at the death camp.

The hatches to the gas chamber-and he leaves them out! But I came to feel upon reflection that there was a kind of method to Mr. Morris' modesty. That by dropping the refutation of Mr. Leuchter's entire premise into the middle of the film and not commenting on it, not giving it any special billboarded, trumpeted attention, he is giving exactly the right weight to it. Exactly the right oh-by-the-way-in-case-anyone-is- so -deluded-as-to-take-this-guy's-pretension-to-science-seriously, it's all bogus. Now let's get on to the more interesting question of why anyone would choose to delude himself this way, and is it possible to believe such hateful nonsense in any kind of innocent way, the way Mr. Leuchter portrays himself-as a questing naïf.

I'm inclined to believe the best epitaph for Mr. Leuchter in the film was provided by David Irving, of all people, in an interview in the film in which he says that The Leuchter Report had "converted" him. Mr. Irving describes Mr. Leuchter as someone who exhibits "criminal simplicity." And he means it as a compliment, as a way of evoking Mr. Leuchter's supposed innocent scientific objectivity. Mr. Death could be said to be a portrait of that fascinating borderline realm between sinister innocence and criminal simplicity. It suggests that at a certain point even innocent stupidity becomes criminal, sinister, culpably evil. After Mr. Death , it will be impossible even for the criminally stupid to claim innocence again.

All this P.R. for the virtues of aging makes me grouchy. A positive attitude about life is a fine thing, of course, and for those who can manage it 24 hours a day I have only admiration and chronic envy. But I suspect I'm not alone in thinking that a crock is a crock, and lasting a long time is not an unmitigated good. In fact, it might be one of the very worst things that can happen to you. Which is why when I read that, in the not so distant future, scientists might find a way to prolong our life spans up to 150 or 175 years on average, I did not dance for joy, though I still can. I winced. "Good years," they said, "arthritis-free, brain-clicking years," they said. "Sure," I thought, "a new sucker applies for Social Security every 30 seconds."

My anxiety has nothing to do with wrinkles and sagging or trembling muscles. That's just the book cover. I'm more concerned about the inside pages, the things that are permanently writ on the soul. As we get older, we don't so much get wiser (whatever the sages say) as more adjusted to calamity, more weathered by event, more worn out by things that we wished for and didn't get or things we did get and didn't wish for. Let me be specific. When I was a child and I heard of a flood in the distant Mississippi Delta, I could weep for the homeless and I could see the mud on the living room floor and in my mind's eye I could see the photograph album, the wedding pictures sinking among the rocks, the branches and the rapid current. I felt a kinship, a sharp keen cut, a pain for those who suffered.

However, so many floods later, so many massacres later, so many cattle cars on their way to Auschwitz, so many bodies in the Balkan snow, so many little children with stick arms and big bellies in the Sudan, so many avalanches and terrorists attacks, train derailments and muggings in the park later, so many reports of child abuse and wife-beating and border wars and famine, and my inner skin is thick like the hide of the oldest rhinoceros at the water hole.

I don't linger over images and brood over individual stories. I skip the tears. I give a universal so-what's-it-to-me shrug. I know the score.

Something worse will happen tomorrow. I have retreated inside the border of my private brain. I give what I can, of course, but I imagine as little as possible. Ah, what a loss of the world this is. I balance my checkbook, sort of. I count the worth of my treasury. I mourn the losses of my expectations.

I will be surprised by little except the actual pain of whatever personal disaster comes to me next. I was a sweet child and I am so sweet no longer. This partial closing of the gates of empathy, this too is age, and I would be surprised if I am alone in this.

There was something wonderful in the early days of my motherhood when I thought I could create human beings that would leap from rock to rock, like sturdy mountain goats, and soak in the sunshine and do all the right things and pass my genes like shining gems along to their descendants. I was overconfident. It was harder than I thought, and the process has wised me up.

Whatever I will do from my 100th year to my 150th year will not be as fraught with drama, with real effect, with impact on my heart as this child-birthing, child-raising thing about which the older person can only say, "Ah, well" or "But for" or "If only," or turn on the TV news. The work itself is over. Could I actually bear to visit a grandchild in the hospital with breast cancer? Do I want to see marriages collapse and vows be broken and the poet in the family turn mute and the banker in the family lose his funds? Do I want to be there for the next 1,000 emergencies? Not exactly.

No thanks. Sure I know that graduations, birthdays, celebrations will come, too. Would they be sufficient compensation for the bad days? I doubt it. The thing about getting older is not that the sun can't be enjoyed, or the feel of a thirst-quenching drink on a hot day won't please, or the hand of the person you love in your hand won't always be a good thing, but that the odds begin to swing against you, and no matter how hard you try to brave it out, worse and worser will surely come your way.

I know this is not the right thing to say. It's not the right thing to think. A million self-help books will probably arrive in the mail. But I feel we need a little balance on this age issue before they have us all signing on for double terms, re-enlisting in an army with a track record of sending its troops into battle unprepared and unarmed. Yes to the beginning of each new day … but in proportion, with dignity or clarity, with an honest acceptance of regret that certain things are gone, certain doors are closed. Don't chirp at me about the wonders of age. I would prefer to be born again, a second chance, and if science could actually arrange that, I wouldn't complain. Not me. However, I do not want New Age tracts, so don't send those on, either. I am too tough a bird for primitive magic. I do not mistake fervent wish for truth itself. We don't in fact get better and better as we get older. We just get older.

Men search out younger women. Women daydream. Booksellers sell books. Illusion spinners spin. Me, I believe with Dylan Thomas that we should go out raging, not making nice. But enough is enough, and 150 years is too much.

High above Times Square, in bright letters, we see the intimate thoughts of regular folks-intimate thoughts about Jell-O. "I make Jell-O gelatin shimmy, shake, and jiggle just for fun. It makes me giggle," wrote one Joan Verdeal of Arvada, Colo.

It's part of a contest. Those who entered were asked to explain why Jell-O makes them "smile more," in 75 words or less. The grand prize winners got to meet Bill Cosby. The runners-up got their name in lights over Times Square, alongside their writing. Reached by phone, Mrs. Verdeal, a 68-year-old mother of five grown children, said she wasn't aware her name was up in lights over Manhattan.

She said she enters contests as a hobby and wins something in one out of every 15 she enters. "I do a lot of rewriting," she said. " A lot! You can spend three days writing one 25-word entry, sometimes more."

Last May, Mrs. Verdeal won a trip for two to New York in a contest sponsored by Equal sugar substitute-but it was "a trip from hell," she said. Mechanical problems with the plane. Taxi strike. Cold rain. Dirty looks from Al Gore's Secret Service detail in the hotel lobby.

Mrs. Verdeal wasn't exactly thrilled to be talking to a reporter. About 30 years ago, she said, she won a contest that allowed her to go on a grocery-store shopping spree, and the woman from the Rocky Mountain News got it all wrong.

"The reporter who wrote the story," said Mrs. Verdeal, "she made me sound like somebody in tennis shoes racing through the store. That just wasn't how it was! I saw a headline in the paper, 'Woman Goes Berserk in Supermarket,' and I thought to myself, Oh, the poor thing. And I read the article and I realized- My gosh! That's me! Oh! "

Mrs. Verdeal said there was nothing "berserk" about her performance that day. In fact, she was methodical. She even made prior arrangements with the meat department to have a turkey and a roast ready for her to pluck on her way by. And when she was done with the spree, she still had time to spare.

-Andrew Goldman

No Jazz Fest This Year

Guys,

I know you've been talking about it since November-$268, round trip! Everyone's gonna be there! Terri, Kari, Kristy, Brimley, Big Money, Spanker, Jeeker!-and you need to know if I'm in. But I don't think I'll be going to Jazz Fest this year.

The thought of flying into New Orleans on a Thursday night, dropping the stuff off at the condo and immediately hitting the bars (Mermaid Lounge!) until 3 A.M., then having a couch nap, waking up woodless at 9 A.M., mouth full of sawdust, empties everywhere … slurping some frozen daiquiris at Daiquiris, dragging myself to the fairgrounds by noon, and it's smoking hot on that field, 11 stages of continuous music, jazz and blues and zydeco and don't forget the gospel tent, and we're eating crawfish Monica and fried po' boys and jambalaya in a paper bowl, washing it all down with Miller Genuine Draft … the sorority girls from Tulane and 'Bama, the old-timers in Hawaiian shirts and shades, women in bikinis riding the shoulders of topless men, ambulances at the edge of the field, the lines, the folk artists in lawn chairs with their folk art, 80,000 people sharing 600 Porta Pottis cooking in the sun all day … alligator sausages, the whole ritual of getting lost and looking for the group's decorated pole … keepin' up the good mood, stokin' the old enthusiasm, mushrooms, beer, ecstasy, beer.

Then what? It's 7 P.M. We're filthy. Drive back to the condo , take a nap ("mergin' with the couch"), a shower, cram ourselves into a restaurant and it's off to Fat Harry's, Tipitina's, and we're all doing that dance, the White Man's Overbite, where you bite your lower lip and don't move too much, get that second wind, hit that biker bar the Dungeon (opens 4 A.M.! dude! ).

The Meters! The Neville Brothers! Dr. John! It's 5:30 A.M. and Smilin' Myron are still playin' on Maple Street, everyone's sweatin' and spent, body shaking from lack of sugar, pop 15 milligrams of Vicodin, ahhhhh … but here come the spicy-chicken-gumbo squirts… look into a red plastic cup filled with butts and tobacco juice and get ready to do it all over again on Saturday and Sunday … but only after those big bowls of chickory coffee.

Can't do it, guys. Call me a dick, but I'm not going to Jazz Fest this year.

-George Gurley

The Real World: Auschwitz

Irene Zisblatt didn't tell her children until they were 13 and 11 years old, respectively, that she was a Holocaust survivor. "I didn't want to place that burden on them," she said in an interview, just after the Paris Theater premiere of The Last Days , James Moll's emotionally wrenching documentary about the final year of World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp. "And my son is still in denial. Until tonight." She pointed at her 41-year-old son.

"Or tomorrow," said the son, who had just seen his mother relive the Holocaust in The Last Days prior to a reception at the Plaza Hotel.

Mrs. Zisblatt-a 68-year-old-blonde woman from Czechoslovakia-was one of five people gathered in the room who lived through the horror and emigrated to America in 1947 and 1948. The others were Representative Tom Lantos, 71, a tall, white-haired, 10-term Congressman from south of San Francisco; Renée Firestone, 74, a cherubic lecturer with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles; Alice Lok Cahana, 70, an introspective artist from Houston; and Bill Basch, 72, a gregarious Los Angeles businessman.

They were originally filmed telling their stories by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. Later, thanks to a $1.5 million donation from the Kenneth and Evelyn Lipper Foundation, Mr. Moll, the director, began to fashion a film out of some 50,000 individual interviews. He focused on a group of Hungarian Jews at the war's end. All of them have powerful stories-but perhaps Mrs. Zisblatt's is the one most people will remember from The Last Days .

"My mother gave me five little diamonds when we were separated at the camp," she said. "To use if I needed to trade for something." In the film, she recalls hiding the gems in her mouth during inspections. Whenever the soldiers checked the mouths of the prisoners for gold fillings, she would swallow her diamonds and retrieve them later from her own excrement. Today, they are mounted on a silver teardrop pin, which she wears on a thin chain around her neck.

Renée Firestone, who breaks into a ready smile, has also been working for the Shoah Foundation since it started in 1994. In The Last Days , she calmly questions Dr. Hans Munch, an acquitted Nazi war criminal who performed chilling experiments on her beloved sister, Klara. Everyone who sees the film wonders how she kept from attacking him.

"It's not about fighting," she said sweetly. "It's about closure."

These days, Mrs. Firestone, a former fashion designer ("my picture was once in every window of Macy's"), lectures on tolerance. She's even pen pals with a neo-Nazi skinhead incarcerated in Texarkana, Tex. "It's a tight facility," she said.

Mrs. Zisblatt also knew the horrible Dr. Munch.

"I recognized him," she said, with a shiver, "when I saw the first cut of the movie. We called him 'the Bloodsucker.' In December 1944, we were on the tables, being experimented on. They were taking our blood, Jewish blood, and sending it to the German front. I can still remember the bodies-they were like zombies."

The group seemed to agree about most things-but they were split on Roberto Benigni's movie, Life Is Beautiful .

"I thought it was brilliant," said Representative Lantos. "It's a fable after all, and much of history has been communicated that way."

Mrs. Firestone vehemently disagreed: "It's not that it makes the Holocaust a joke, but it could never have happened, hiding a child in the camp. He should have gone into hiding in Italy with the little boy."

Bill Basch, who remembers Auschwitz acutely ("Hunger is an awesome pain," he said as trays of petits fours passed by), shook his head. "There is comedy in life," he said. "I was very moved."

Alice Cahana, red-haired and careful, was probably the quietest in the group. At one point during the reception, she mentioned that she was about to have her 70th birthday. "I never thought I'd live to 17, forget 70," she said. In The Last Days , she revisits Auschwitz and recalls leading prayers in the latrine. "It was the one place the soldiers wouldn't go," she said, "because the smell was so terrible."

-Roger D. Friedman